WELSH hospital trusts will return to south-east Asia next month in a bid to offset national nursing shortages with Filipino staff.

WELSH hospital trusts will return to south-east Asia next month in a bid to offset national nursing shortages with Filipino staff.

A consortium of three Welsh hospital trusts is planning the recruitment drive despite fears in the Philippines that some of its hospitals are facing closure because of the exodus overseas.

Nurses' leaders in Wales last night called for more investment in recruitment and retention strategies at home to end reliance on overseas staff.

They want to see more done to encourage the 4,000 to 6,000 qualified nurses in Wales who have left the profession to return to the NHS.

The head of the Royal College of Nursing in Wales, Liz Hewett, condemned what she called a "workforce planning blight" in Wales and said, "Not enough has been done to get these nurses back and to retain the current workforce.

"More needs to be done, and that means more money and more investment.

"Recruiting overseas is a medium-term fix to our problems, because arguably if it was a short-term solution we wouldn't be going back."

Welsh hospitals have recruited unprecedented numbers of overseas nurses from the Philippines, Spain and India in recent years to fill vacancies. Many recruitment teams have made several trips abroad to sign on nurses as more than 700 nursing, midwifery and health visitor posts remain vacant in Wales.

There are now 844 overseas nurses working in Wales, making up 3.3% of the nursing workforce.

North Glamorgan NHS Trust, which runs Prince Charles Hospital in Merthyr, is one of the three trusts returning to the Philippines because it can fill only about 14 of 39 nursing vacancies with nurses trained in Wales. It recruited 39 Filipino nurses in December 2000 and 37 of them are still working for the trust.

North Glamorgan trust spokesman Phillip Williams said, "The Philippines is a long way to go to find nurses but we recruited such a good batch the first time around - they are such dedicated and caring people - that we don't want to go anywhere else.

"The original recruits, bar two, are still working in the hospital and if there are more in the Philippines we will try and recruit some more.

"All trusts are in the same boat. We're all looking abroad because we are still playing catch-up with the numbers of nurses in the system. In the next two or three years there should be enough nurses in the system to recruit nurses trained in this country."

Consortium partner Bro Morgannwg NHS Trust, which runs the Princess of Wales Hospital in Bridgend, is hoping to recruit an extra 30 nurses in the Philippines.

A spokeswoman said this would be the trust's third recruitment programme for nurses from the Philippines "who have proved to be excellent and valued members of staff".

In the Philippines there is increasing concern that its health service cannot afford to lose large numbers of staff to the West. The country is also an important recruiting ground for the United States which, it is thought, needs an extra million nurses. Such recruiting drives tend to target the most experienced nurses, leaving a void of knowledge and skills.

Former Filipino Health Secretary Professor Jamie Glavez Tan said earlier this month, "I see the Philippines health system collapsing in five years unless the exodus is halted.

"We are facing an extremely serious crisis. People here are dying because we do not have enough nurses to run our hospitals - they are all in Britain."

Ms Hewett said, "I think the Welsh Assembly Government, the NHS and other employers looking overseas have to be absolutely sure that they are not behaving in any way unethically and are depleting countries that have as great, if not greater, need for nurses as we have."

A spokeswoman for the National Assembly said, "The Assembly recognises that Wales needs to work towards being self-sufficient in nursing staff and has implemented many initiatives to increase the number of nurses available to trusts, including a large rise in the number of nurses in training.

"There has been agreement across the board that recruitment of overseas nurses should be done responsibly, taking into account everyone's needs and requirements."